In 2019, federal Conservatives sought to draw voters in their direction with the slogan: “It’s time for you to get ahead.”

But they didn’t get enough of those voters to form government, and so 2020 finds the Conservatives needing to figure out how to get ahead themselves.

“There is an opportunity for the party to define or redefine itself, reconfigure its identity, figure out what it is, and then move forward,” said Semhar Tekeste, who worked for the Conservatives both in Opposition and in government, and is now a public-affairs consultant.

They have three places to figure that out: in the House of Commons as the official Opposition, in a leadership race, and at a policy convention scheduled for November.

At the centre of all three, in one way or another, is the current leader of the party, Andrew Scheer.

When he was elected leader in 2017, he was billed as “Stephen Harper with a smile,” a nod to the leader who led the party from 2004 until 2015 and won three elections.

But the party has been running on much the same platform since Harper first formed government in 2006, said Dean Tester, a Conservative strategist who has worked on several party campaigns, including that of Scheer’s main rival in the 2017 race, former minister Maxime Bernier.

“Is running with that platform enough to get it done in the 2020s? Can we win with the exact same coalition and same policies with a different face? To me, I don’t think so,” he said.

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